Movies and Music

It's not Friday yet, but let's pretend it is: Random Ten! Quite a day for the Guitar Heroes.

1. Theoretical Girls - Mom & Dad
2. A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall - Bill Frisell
3. Carter Family - He took a white rose from her hair
4. Pavement - Two States (live)
5. Audioslave - Doesn't Remind me of Anything
6. Brian Jonestown Massacre - Vacuum Boots
7. Love - Laughing Stock
8. Richard Thompson - Mingus Eyes (live)
9. Pere Ubu - Turquoise Fins
10. Pink Floyd - Take up thy stethoscope and Walk

Elsewhere - in my recent movie reviews, I neglected to mention Banlieue 13 - nothing special, maybe, but a pretty enjoyable bit of b-movie nonsense. There's a plot of sorts, involving stolen nukes and double crosses and the like, but it is best forgotten. The acting is non-existent, the dialogue and such functional at best (not very) - but the action scenes are done with real flair. One of the stars, David Belle, apparently invented a sport called parkour - which consists, I guess, of jumping over stuff. It's like those bits in Jackie Chan movies where he runs up walls or dives through windows, extended for 15 minutes at a time, through dingy high-rise tenement building and warehouses. It makes for some pretty damn great cinema - it really is hard to improve on filming human bodies in motion - these bodies move with amazing grace and strength, and the filming is mostly free of annoying effects: just show a guy jumping off a building without breaking stride, and you're halfway home already. It keeps the film grounded, human scaled - the emphasis is on what the stunt men (and the stars are basically stunt men themselves, I think) are doing, their movement through the environment. It may be cheese, but it's great fun.

And finally - in totally different film type news - I see from Wiley Wiggins' blog that David Lynch's short masterpiece from Lumiere and Company is on Google video. More there in 55 seconds than his imitators could dream of.